What do u think of Bush proposing major immigration reform?

Just to visit the US many have to provide US officials with information on their job and salary and are often rejected for no reason other than mere suspicion of immigration.

I know countless well to do foreigners who merely wanted to visit Disney Wold but were rejected entry into the US because they come from a poor country.

The situation is absurd. Americans lose sight of humanity through selfish xenophobia.

nimh

Sorry, have been busy, but wanted to tell you that your comments earlier on Chomsky represent the first intelligent comments I've bumped into.

Complaints that he gets the facts wrong don't hold up. In his political analyses, as in his field of study, it is his intellectual integrity upon which his credibility sits, and he's easily smart enough to know that.

But he is, perhaps by constitution, something of a complainer. I happen to believe he complains about exactly the right things, and also believe that without his analytic capabilities, our understanding of many things (eg the handmaiden to power function of modern media) would be greatly impoverished. Yet, one can easily imagine him protesting pretty much any social arrangement he might have been born into.

I usually only save stuff i like, so i dont have anything at hand to quote.

But it was for example during the yugoslav war that I got really annoyed by his stuff.

His primary interest - like that of many peers - seems to forever lie with the enemies he's fighting at home ... and whichever country's problems he turns his attention on, he will redefine them to fit the patterns he's identified (and fought) back home. Thats the impression i got away with there.

Very marxist, really - not his thinking per se, but that he does that. But myself, i cant stand - and i'm only very loosely referring to chomsky in particular, here - people who, when they look at kosovars or nigerians or uzbeks and the fates they face or fight, still only see their own political struggle, and simply project its categories and identifiers onto the scene. It's because they don't really care about the locals - those are just more symbols for their big scheme of things - thats why local contexts are best explained away. They only really care about their own fight & grail.

Bush, the leftist?
"We Americans pride ourselves on our flexible, relatively unregulated labor markets. Yet Bush's plan flies in the face of this tradition. It requires a determination that employers make "every reasonable effort to find an American to fill a job before extending job offers to foreign workers," and it contains numerous other rules and regulations that will have to be observed--and enforced. (source)

THE MEEK FINALLY INHERIT SOMETHING: Whatever else you think of the George W. Bush immigration plan, just focus on this: It will make life better for millions of the disadvantaged. How often does any government action achieve this? And shouldn't a better life for the needy be among the first goals of government policy? Surely it should be among the first goals of liberal government policy. That a conservative president has done something to help millions of people with money problems, little power and an anxiety-filled life--the meek, in New Testament terms--seems such a departure from the script that the anti-poverty aspects of the Bush initiative are simply being ignored.

Yes, there are political considerations in Bush's immigration initiative, but reaction has pretended there are only political considerations. Set aside whether Bush's decision will help Democrats or Republicans, and consider how it will help the poor. Millions of hardworking illegals who live in constant anxiety in the United States--the comfortable U.S. majority cannot imagine the endless personal apprehension and feeling of powerlessness that comes from illegal status--will be able to stop living in fear.

<snip>

Plus there is the combination of Bush's immigration plan with his proposal to ensure that illegal workers get full credit for their Social Security taxes, and can take the benefits back home with them when they retire. Millions of illegal workers have been paying in to Social Security with no chance of getting anything in return, which in effect transfers money from one of society's worst-off groups to one of its best-off groups, middle-class American retirees. A working life of arduous low-paid toil, followed by impoverished retirement, has been the lot of millions of illegals in the United States. Now that can change. And many will have the option of returning home on retirement, in most cases to Mexico, where the buying power of the Social Security dollar is ten times what it is in the United States.

Had a Democratic president proposed exactly what George W. Bush has proposed for the treatment of illegal immigrant workers, editorialists might have called it bleeding-heart liberalism. Fine! Hearts should bleed for the needy. That commentators have focused instead on political vote-totals analysis, and petty sniping at the Bush plan just tells us how removed contemporary media is from the struggles of the average person, and how little today's upper-middle-class journalist or upper-class political pundit cares about the daily struggles of the people who trim his or her lawn.

the federal minimum wage is worth nearly a third less in real-dollar terms that it was in the 1960s. (In 1963, the federal minimum wage was $7.25 an hour in current dollars; the 2004 federal minimum wage is $5.15.)

It remains a national scandal that a person can work 40 hours a week at the current federal minimum wage and be impoverished by the poverty-line definition. (The 2003 Census Bureau poverty line for a childless couple was $12,120; 40 hours for 50 weeks at the current federal minimum wage brings home $10,300, minus taxes.)